Hmm, Jin is taking an interest in the individual characteristics of others, trying to get a bearing on the world she`s wrought? All and all the interest and the lucidity bodes well. Jin is, I think, recovering her humanity. Escaping the “ant farm existance” as it was described.

I find an interesting implication here: presumably there have been parts of the time loop where Tina was not killed and replaced by her demons, and was still herself at the time of the reset. Jin is just now realizing that the Tina she’s known through all of her lives will never exist again.

Heh, with something so subtle, it sucks when people don’t see it, even after so much craftsmanship. The half lidded eyes and crooked mouth (I forget the word for that) giving the impression of remembering something painful, either that was painful or now is painful….
And as for Tina, her soul has departed. Now, it isn’t said anywhere yet where one’s soul goes, but simply that it isn’t there, and the demons are. And the demons DO keep it functional. She does eat and drink and etc. As for other social/bodily functions, those are left to be speculated on.

I’ve tried a few types of tea but I don’t have the resources, memory, attention span, etc. to be a fanatic of anything, I don’t think. ;p
I do like more of black teas than like a green tea, if you’ve ever heard of the “Salada” brand? Not that into earl grey. Tried jasmine and liked the ‘floweriness’ along with oulong. I’ll have to find and try some lapsang…
But I must admit, when I read “Souchong” it made me think of Bioshock.
“Papa Souchong”

May I ask, simply, why? And Brandi HAS changed her hair a few times, but is that simply style? The hair is not able to be cut? Grown? Can Jin TEACH the trick, perhaps to Bud, who seems to want to be able to change her hair?

Unfamiliar with the name of the tea, but guessing it, possibly Jin is of Asian descent, possibly Chinese?

I’m still confused that she showed up as a “kawaii desu ne!” school girl but is actually Aztec/South American?

Also the distance between (demon) Tina & Jin gives me a sad. But will we get more of Tina’s back story? So far we know she’s the daughter of a mobster and the coffee shop has a cement basement and unidentifiable stains?

None of the GGGs are Aztec/South American/Central American/… – though they played the part for a while (with Jin even being Tochtli). Neither is Tepoz. They all originated in the Old World thousands of years before any of the ancient New World civilizations existed. Remember, the GGGs were basically being hidden there – keeping their power out of the wrong hands is my interpretation.

I wonder how many cycles I would have “let slip” just to enjoy/pamper friends. Suddenly I can’t decide which is worse, that I would waste a few thousand years for a few sweet decades, or that I might not.

There was a Stargate SG1 episode in which the team was thrown into a time loop repeating every few days, but only a couple of the team realized they were in a time loop and could remember each loop — after busting their buns thru a bunch of loops trying to learn enough to figure out how to break the loop, they suddenly had the revelation that they could take a vacation for a few loops and do whatever the heck they wanted – and they did. 😀

Looks like Jin might be reaching out to establish a bit more of a human connection with someone she was friends with in a previous loop, now that the timeline has been stabilized. Though I guess since Tina’s not really human that may not be quite right…

Me too! Deep, smokey, very fragrant. I’ve heard it described as the “black coffee of teas”. Nah – it’s much better! Tho’ it’s gotten amusing reactions from friends. One guy thought I was drinking somethin’ made outta a weed somethin’ that is just a mite illegal! Most of them just go, “Eeccchhh! She drinking that stinky tea again!!Gleaah!” LOL, they don’t know what they’re missing! MmmmmMMMmmmm!

I’d think, given how badly she apparently wanted it, that learning she could never be human again was worse, even if at the time she was not mentally able to really understand. I wonder how she’s dealing with that now that here are fewer bats in her belfry.

(If I were Jin, I might be guilt tripping Mayahuel to find some way to fix that; or at least to unmake me so I wouldn’t have to face the prospect of existing for all eternity whether I wanted to or not. And speaking of guilt, I’m wondering how Bud and Brandi are going to get along with May. “Yeah, it was because of you that we were kidnapped, imprisoned, mutilated, tortured and raped, over and over, and then burned alive and turned into super-powered monsters who killed millions and can destroy the world. How are you going to make up for that?” Relations between the GGG and May could be kind of … tense…

If Lapsang is an acquired taste then I shudder to think what Pu Erh would be called. But I am delighted that Tina appears to have it there. Is the availability of low-demand items some demonic power of Tina’s or is there some faint memory of a lost friendship at work in her subconscious mind?
Oh, and hello everybody. I’m a recent reader who could’t resist commenting when tea was mentioned. Sad, I know.

Another tea lover! I found what Pu Erh I’ve had to be very earthy and reminded me of what the “taste” of burning autumn leaves is like. It’s different and supposed to be good for the digestions after a heavy or fatty meal and great for lowering cholesterol.
Personally, I like a good astringent green, a woodsy Oolong and the oft maligned Lapsang. All without sugar or milk, plz! I know with veteran tea drinkers that goes without saying, but I know a few noobs who can’t get used to just tea and tea alone. I’m afraid I’m a real hard-core tea freak! LOL!!

I’m waiting on my first order of Lapsang, after hearing about it from an Aussie author and podcaster. I’m about ankle deep in my exploration of tea, having branched out from the realm of mint herbals and roiboss and into blacks and Earl Greys. I’m wondering how much deeper this stuff is going to put me 🙂

I doubt the people she murdered for no reason, other than to show she could, would agree. The thing about killing someone is that you don’t just kill them but you also kill all the people they would have produced down through the subsequent years via generations that would have come about. Thus, it’s a crime that sweeps through all future time. Yes, I know, sometimes killing is unavoidable, but that does not negate the truth of it all. So, if you murder someone, is there really any punishment that is equal to your crime? Can you ever atone for all those others you deprived of a chance to live?

Who did May ever murder for “no reason”? We see Jin in a “job interview” prove her skills, so to speak, but May? May simply made a really large mistake allowing very nasty sorts to get their hands on the knowledge to make golems — probably she thought they weren’t smart enough or advanced enough to figure the process out on their own and was desperate to get the Calendar Machine out of their hands. It could well be that in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, the Calendar Machine could have made the Chimera seem like a new born kitten — after all, it time looped the whole world as just a strange side effect.

That was May who sliced the guard up. It was explained more in the Wapsi Books. One of the guards that was responsible for the priests violent take over of the city of Lanthis as a backlash of technological achievement finding more answers to questions that their religion could no longer answer.

Ahhh! OK, but I’d say that was a very long way from killing for “no reason” — in my view, there’s very little more fundamentally evil (or more likely to wield that evil) than power mad religious zealots, of any stripe. I assume that was May’s way of getting inside to get the Calendar Machine away from them.

I think we are at the 5 deep limit, so I’m responding to Redbeard from Paul’s post.

So with all that “intelligence” and power at her command that was the best she could do? She couldn’t figure out a way without killing several people on her way in? And doing such evil to stop greater evil is no excuse. Where does that stop? The end does not justify the means. Unless you’re a Nazi or Jihadist. One has to wonder how many others she had killed from time to time in persuit of her goal, or just for the hell of it, since it seemed to come so easily to her. She even seemed to enjoy it.

RE Redbeard’s comment that “May simply made a really large mistake”: If you think about it, May has made a series of mistakes, each worse than the last. She created the Calendar Machine, and then let it fall into the hands of the priests. To get the Machine back, she developed Golum technology and taught enough of it to the priests that they could figure out how to make the Chimera. And then, trying to destroy the Machine, she bungled it again and locked the world into endless time loops. I would HOPE she’s ended her streak, now; I’m not sure Jin (or the Earth) can take much more of this…

I imagine messing with the events of the time stream can screw with ones sense of right and wrong. What is a peaceful village one century could become a despotic empire the next. So which is the bigger crime? Wipe out the small peaceful village, wait and wipe out the larger village that has become the despotic empire and killed many in the process, or do nothing?

The problem with messing with the timeline is that doing so makes us all someone’s puppets with no real self determination or free will. Then there is the distinct possibility that doing so will result in a world even worse than that which would have been. There may be minimal harm manipulating a few people as did Jin, but anything on a larger scale, like the villiage example, would likely cause vast unintended consequences. In the story line here, manipulating the few people Jin did was justified as she was actually trying to free them from the endless cycle in which everyone was trapped. As things stood, humanity wasn’t accomplishing anything or had any real free will anyway. Once the deed was done, she stopped her manipulation (we assume).

Well, at the 5 deep limit, but I intend to use my post to respond to just about everything in this “thread” in some form.

Ok, The story as from what I’ve seen (now having read every page of the comic (online) in under a week, I think, and reading all of the comments up to today’s page but not many past today’s page, but not having read anything from WS books) is that you have Lanthis, super old city/civilization, that acquired super awesome tech that made the religions of the time basically obsolete. In a sort of “Death throes” scenario, the religidiots enact a coup so that religion > tech again. Mayahuel [sic?], Jin’s Mother, is one of the more learned. She is also apparently very dangerous in her own right. Where the Calendar machine and various other technologies that are used and evident to present day, how the Lanthian civilization is old, old, maybe another old in here, or two or three, world compared to the new world old civilisations (It’s like having an old old book and a new old book… supposedly parts of the same story, just different sets of chapters, different events, the same supreme leader with totally different personalities, etc.), and how this is all relevant all sort of escape me at the moment. Ok, so, religidiots take over the world as they knew it. Maya plays veg-o-matic with some peoples’ faces, and that’s about all we see. We know Maya killed people. We know she had a hand in building the Calendar Machine and then in the subsequent disruption of its rhythm. We know she spent 80,000 + years in the demon realm, which may seem infinitely longer to her.
Did she deserve it? Was it a punishment that was too harsh, adequate, or not harsh enough? Well, punishment(s ) should fit the crime(s ), right? What is her crime(s )? She killed a bunch of guards, perhaps more than a bunch, and perhaps more than those guards. She fucked up the Calendar Machine. Are those crimes horrible enough as is to require so horrible a punishment as she received, or are they not, as they are, as bad as to require such a punishment? Well, then Intent comes into play, I would think. Is Maya only as guilty as a soldier on the front lines is guilty of homicide, etc.? Kill or be killed. Being FORCED into such a predicament by others. The VIOLENT take-over could have ended in her death, no? Did she CHOOSE to fight such a battle because the religidiots chose to stage a coup? Or, were there other ways… Assuming she has knowledge or predication of future events. Letting those guards live, etc. would lead to horrible scenarios. As an analogy: You/Maya are standing on a bridge. You have a three way switch in your hands. A train, on track 1, is barreling at a school bus full of children. You could switch the track at an upcoming junction to Track 2, that also has a bus broken down on it, but it is bus full of death row inmates, or you can put the train on track 3, which is clear. Assuming Maya had such options, is her crime that she chose track 1 or 2 instead of track 3? What if those children were to grow up and become the ancestors of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and any other horribly dis-likable character in the story books of history? That is also assuming that Maya HAD such future knowledge, like seeing what was ahead on the train tracks. What if it was foggy and all she could tell were screams of little children in one direction, screams of grown men and women in one direction, but silence from another? What if the motive was simply REVENGE!? She probably KNEW people who were killed in the violent coup and/or was a target, herself. What if she was a total bystander who happened to just be very smart and studied well in school and decided to act as an assassin for the shits, giggles, and because she liked a video game she played once where she acted as an assassin?
With the knowledge presented, could it potentially be any of these scenarios? Well, perhaps we should go buy and read the books for more answers. Or perhaps someone can shut me up by providing further info that narrows down the possible scenarios: 1) Maya is a murdering bitch who deserved what she got if not more so, 2) Maya was doing what she had to, and probably didn’t deserve what she got or she DID deserve what she got or more so despite doing what she felt she had to do, … etc.

As to the timeline question, what is to say there WAS a “time loop” but more of a single timeline, continuing on indefinitely, that had parts of it seem to repeat a couple of times, as perceived by a few people. It’s shown that a concept of a “timeline” continues outside the real world, INCLUDING the demon realm, and other realms, because even if “time” doesn’t happen in the demon realm, the demons perceive a change in time. They cannot simply pop into the real world through any door available in egypt in the time of the pharaohs one second, pop back into DR, and then pop back out in the time of Lanthis. Phix has seen the change in time, with the ability to count how many times the cycle has happened, etc. So, was Jin REALLY “screwing with the timeline” ? I think not. She could predict with high probability what was going to happen if she did nothing or a specific something, so, by changing what she did, she caused different results.
Now, if there IS a timeline, AT ALL, isn’t there a chance that the timeline has a definite beginning, end, middle, flow in between the three points, etc. and that there really ISN’T such a thing as free will, simply an illusion of it? Or, if there is a timeline but the end is not definite, therefore, the middle is also not definite (but it must have had a definite beginning), then that timeline supersedes the seeming ‘timeline’ that ‘loops’ as explained above in that there is one beyond just the “cycle” present in this one world/realm. So, to be honest, either Free Will is an illusion, or there is no free will at all, but it was never taken away due to Jin’s actions because she never could TRULY “mess with the timeline” .

Could there be more to the question about collecting teapots? Maybe a magical mythical teapot leading to new adventures? The last panels expression makes me think so.That’s my opinion. But, I could be wrong.

My 2 pence… Tina’s loss of interest in collecting antique teapots makes Jin sad because it shows how far Tina has drifted from her human self. Plus a not so subtle remind of how much Jin herself may never regain.